Category: Security

It’s Data Privacy Day on Sunday January 28th and it serves as an important reminder to pull ourselves up by our digital bootstraps and lockdown all that personal information that we willingly sprinkle all over the internet.

Small and medium sized businesses are not actively being targeted by cyberattackers, so I‘ve got time to get my security measures in place, right?

Nope.

You are not alone in thinking this however. According to a recent study conducted by Edelman Intelligence for the major US insurance provider Nationwide, 41% of business owners believe cyberattacks happen more frequently in large businesses than in small businesses. In actuality, small businesses are often more vulnerable to cyberattacks than large businesses because they lack the financial and technical resources to implement robust security infrastructures. And don’t think it’s any different in Canada.

Most Canadian Businesses Aren’t Sufficiently Prepared to Prevent Downtime or DDoS Attacks

The DNS is like the unsung hero of the Internet. It’s the magic that makes the Internet logical and navigable for its human users. When it’s working as expected, most of us take it for granted … until something goes wrong.

Action Required by Most GeoTrust, RapidSSL and Thawte to Customers to Remain Trusted by World’s Most Popular Browser

As you may be aware, in early 2017 the developers of Google’s Chrome web browser formally expressed concern regarding evidence that Symantec had failed on multiple occasions to properly conduct required validation prior to the issuance of many of their SSL certificates.

The rude awakening

You’ve finally settled on the perfect domain name for your blog or small business. You’ve registered it with a trusted Canadian registrar like Webnames.ca. You’ve barely begun to setup email and web hosting, yet the very next day, you wake up to an inbox full of spam – emails hawking web design, SEO services, prospect lists, app development, video production – you name it. Some target you by name with clever phishing tricks and malware. Then the text message spam and robocalls start to roll in.

So you have an idea for a business, and you know it’s a winner. But you need the perfect domain: something professional, memorable, succinct and effective. Your domain is your web address online, and an essential part of your online presence—you want it to further your marketing efforts, help you reach your audience and reflect the purpose of your company or cause.

Domain hijacking seems like a foreign concept to most but it is a very real threat. While it doesn’t gain as much attention as spam or malware, domain hijacking is equally as disruptive to businesses and organizations. In most cases, these disruptions are temporary but they can produce lingering fallout on brands.

Webnames.ca was recently alerted to a phishing scam concerning domain suspensions. The phishing emails portray that they are being sent from us and state that your domain has been suspended. However, once the recipient clicks on the link within the spoofed email, they are susceptible to malicious payload.

On Sunday, 100,000 or more WordPress website may have been compromised by a mysterious malware and causing infected sites to download malicious code and attack site visitors. Due to the severity of the attack, Google has already flagged more than 11,000 domain names as malicious but many more sites have been compromised.

Last Tuesday (October 14, 2014), the Security Team at Google announced that a new SSL vulnerability has been discovered. Dubbed POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downloaded Legacy Encryption), the vulnerability allows hackers to gain access to encrypted data, including email, banking and social media accounts. Attacks are dependent on the fact that most web servers and browsers continue to use the 15 year old SSL 3.0 to secure their communications. Although SSL has been succeeded by Transport Layer Security (TSL) encryption, SSL 3.0 is still widely used by to support compatibility with Internet Explorer 6.

Webnames.ca would like to notify all customers that our servers have not been affected by the OpenSSL Security Advisory issued on June 5th 2014 and that your information, data and privacy remain secure.

Webnames.ca would like to notify all customers that our servers have not been affected by the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability and that your information, data and privacy remain uncompromised.

The Heartbleed SSL vulnerability is a serious bug that has affected the popular OpenSSL encryption software. The bug has compromised information that under normal circumstances is protected by powerful encryption. The compromised versions are OpenSSL version 1.0.1 to 1.0.1f.